Photography and Light: Tips for the Everyday Photographer

Photography is all about lighting. A camera is nothing more than a device that burns light onto a sensitive strip of film, paper or in the case of a digital camera, an image sensor. In order to take better photographs, it’s critical to understand how to capture light and preferably, how to bend it to make it do your will.

Photo Lighting Tips

Outdoor Lighting

Unless your creative vision requires strong shadows or taking advantage of the sun’s brightness, you probably don’t want to go outside at high noon and take pictures of your subject in direct sunlight. Strong shadows can cause unflattering distortions in perception.

Diffused sunlight is soft and even and makes photographing outside easier. Take notice of your surroundings and you’ll likely find several places throughout the day which make perfect spots to take photographs.

Open Shade

Find a nice shady spot, such as under a tree, porch or canopy, in the shadow of a building or in an alley. This works especially well for portraits!

Shot in the shadow of my house.

Overcast Days

When the sun is hidden behind a sheet of clouds, it naturally diffuses the light. You may need to be careful of your composition to avoid the inclusion of gray skies, however.

Overcast days are perfect to take food, products, crafts, etc outside to shoot it!

Also known as the magic hour, the first and last hour of light during the day is a photographer’s holy grail. Due to the way sunlight travels through the atmosphere, the light is soft and warm and makes just about anything look good.

Make Your Own Shade: Use a sheer or opaque umbrella, sheet or shower curtain to create your own shaded set up. Unless you want to rig up something to keep this in place, an assistant or two will probably be needed.

Make Your Own Light Box: If you take a lot of photos of food, products or crafts for your blog, you might want to look into making a very cheap and easy lightbox out of a cardboard box and some sheets of white paper. (With the addition of a cheap desk lamp or two from the thrift store you’ll have the ability to shoot both indoors and outdoors.)

Sun Effects

A back lit sunflower! Photo Credit: Kelly Pugliano of Mom Got Blog. Used with permission.

More Photo Lighting Tips

You can use the sun’s brightness to your advantage to photograph shadows, sunflares, starbursts, silhouettes or produce a hazy effect. For more information about attempting these techniques, check out the following articles:

Many of the articles tell you to shoot manually and that it might not be possible on point and shoots. Try it anyway using the other tips given! I’ve seen great sunflare in iPhone camera shots and that’s hardly as sophisticated as a point and shoot!

Indoor Lighting

Indoor lighting is extremely challenging. It’s frequently dim which makes it hard to focus and capture your subjects. It contains multiple light sources which, when combined, could produce odd colors in your photographs. Just like outdoors, take notice of your house throughout the day to find the areas with the best natural and artificial light. This is where you want to take your photos.

Windows with indirect sunlight work great as soft, even light sources. If you have horizontal blinds, you can try angling them to bounce the light off a wall or the ceiling for added depth. Your subject will look less flat with light hitting it from the side. Don’t forget you can also open doors to let in light!

On overcast days, our living room windows make it lovely to take photos of the kids indoors.

Photograph your subjects next to a window receiving indirect light.
Works great for food, crafts or other products.Photo Credit: Lindsay Maddox of Designer Wife. Used with permission.

Low Lighting (Avoiding Flash!)

This is a terrible lighting condition and one place where having a better camera and better lenses will help most. Try turning on or bringing close as many like-colored lights as possible.

Position or catch your subject as close as possible to your light source inside to avoid using flash.

Use the Flash, If You Must

Usually I’d advise keeping your camera’s on-board flash off unless it’s absolutely necessary. It produces harsh shadows and completely darkens the background. (Sometimes it’s cool, many times it isn’t.) Red eye and odd coloring are also side effects of flash.

You could try softening your on-camera flash by sticking a piece of tape or a coffee filter on top. Also check your camera manual to see if it’s possible to control the intensity of the flash and experiment with that. If it’s a shot that can wait, hold off until there’s enough natural light to take it.

Your Photography Challenge

About Lynda Giddens

Lynda is a blogger of 12 years and a self-taught amateur photographer living in Fort Worth, Texas with her husband and two young sons. Be inspired to learn more about photography on her blog, Daily Window. Follow her on Twitter, Flickr or Facebook!

Reader Interactions

Comments

It’s been a crazy week and I somehow missed the challenge…I’m getting all caught up and spending some time reading ~excited about getting my camera out and putting some of these tips into practice. Thanks again for all your help.

This is so helpful! I have a decent camera (up from a point-and-shoot, but not yet a DSLR) but I feel like it’s still the luck of the draw to sometimes get awesome shots. Now I know how to control it and get more pretty pictures!

I’ve had my camera for a long time and am still clueless how to use it other than a point N shoot. I think I need to bookmark this page so I can go through each step at different times to check out the different techniques! Thanks so much. It’s a sunny day so I’m going to go practice.

Kind of late getting to todays challenge, and I missed yesterdays. But I am going to try and get a post up with my edited pictrues today and I already know some places for photos I just need to go take some.

Great info. on lighting – it’s certainly something I’ve wanted to learn more about. I usually just play around with my camera’s setting, and have really begun to see a big difference in the quality of my photos. Thanks!

I will work on my flares one day…I just played around in the backyard with the camera. This is what I came up with. http://bit.ly/e78gnl
Still loving this challenge even if I am so tired all the time. 🙂

I’m really new at photography – I basically want to get great pictures of my kids and that is why I’m learning! Lighting is such a challenge for me. I’m not comfortable enough with my camera to know what to in different situations or what kind of lighting produces what kid of picture. Thank you so much for this post! I’m off to check out all the different pages I opened in separate tabs now! Can’t wait to start learning more!

I love photography – I used to know how to do it with a manual SLR, then it got stolen and I spent years with a Sony point-n-shoot; I still managed to get some decent shots – being aware of light, avoiding the flash, making use of the macro setting and getting up close wherever I could.
Finally for christmas my hubby bought me a digital SLR. Basic but still better than my point-n-shoot.
I love the crispness of the shots and the zoom – still trying to work out everything else.
Thanks for the reminders… nothing better than a blog with lovely images.
xx